ESPN Golf

Nobody has a clue about him, except The New York Times crossword puzzle, where he turns up regularly.

Clue: "The Big Easy of sports." Three down, five across. Clue: "Elegant." What's a three-letter word for elegance?

"Universally liked but not necessarily loved." "If he was an American, he'd be on billboards." "He is world-famous but unknown at the same time." "He has the most beautiful game of all." "He lives the most beautiful life of all." "Todd Hamilton is his Jack Fleck." "Out-putted the 'Boss of the Moss' to win the U.S. Open." "As Colin Montgomerie waited for quiet, he waited for Monty, becoming the first foreigner in 87 years to win a second national championship." "Won the British Open in a crowded playoff, with a Belgian psychologist sitting on his shoulder (like a cartoon mouse) whispering into his ear that, if he held onto this magic feather, he could fly."

Dumbo?

"Injured his knee in July."

"Missed the PGA Championship."

"Housebound."

Like all of the conglomerates at the top of tournament golf, Ernie Els has many houses but only one home, a sprawling brick residence with a thatched, African-style roof, right next to the 16th fairway of the West Course at the Wentworth Club, not far from Windsor Castle or the races at Ascot, in the leafy and horsey heath land of Surrey, England. It's Friday afternoon. The BMW Championship is in progress on the West Course. Other than the Open Championship, this is the European tour's biggest tournament of the year. Yet there is only one American in the field, Ben Curtis, and only one American in the press tent, and he has come to see Els.

For further proof that the U.S. is a world away, and that there are rich sporting events to which America is utterly oblivious, all of England, not just across the Merseyside, is still reverberating from a Liverpudlian miracle two days ago in Istanbul. Though only the fifth- or sixth-best soccer team in the country, Liverpool found itself in the European Cup final against AC Milan. Down 1-0 after scarcely a blink, and 3-0 at halftime, Liverpool somehow came back to win on penalties. A stone pub in Bagshot, just down the road from Wentworth, actually shivered with pleasure from the clamor inside. Performing the best function of sport, a single game has delivered everyone in the country -- in the kingdom -- to the same place. Momentarily, the Kingdom truly is United. Even the Scots, who normally bask in any humiliation that looks to be in store for England, are dancing in the streets. This wave of community joy starts to explain why Els lives here. It isn't the weather.

In a threesome with Thomas Bjorn and Paul Casey, Ernie is on the 16th fairway, directly in front of his house, standing 1 over par. The cut line is even par. He has three holes to make it, or his European-leading string of 60-some straight cuts will go by the boards. Thanks to Tiger Woods' first hiccup in seven years, at Byron Nelson's tournament last May, Els heads the list of PGA Tour cut-makers, too, with 20-some in a row. Finishing birdie, birdie, birdie, Ernie qualifies easily after all. Missing a short putt at 18, Bjorn qualifies uneasily. Twelve over par, Casey is down the road. The moment Casey putts out, Ernie rushes to his side to tell him something he has been dying to tell him for two days. Casey's ball position isn't even in the vicinity of being right.

Els is wearing a peach-colored golf shirt. Coming out of the scorer's trailer after signing for his 69, Ernie is still in battle mode.

"I'm going to hit some balls," he says curtly. After he has hit quite a few, he barks, "I have to putt."

Plugging three tees into the practice putting green, Els rehearses taking the putter head back on a straight line. Longtime caddie Ricci Roberts fields the balls and smokes a cigarette. Roberts could smoke for South Africa. Ernie's wife, Liezl, spreads out a towel and sits down beside the green. A few straggling spectators watch from a hill, but in a flat, hazy light, as the sun falls over the horizon, the course has been returned to the players and their families. Luke Donald, Lee Westwood, Nick O'Hern and others are putting. Wives and girlfriends are dishing. Children are playing tag. Els finishes his work and, without a word, strides off. Liezl hurries to catch up. Shrugging the bag onto his right shoulder, Ricci signals with a jerk of his head to follow. The instant Ernie's spikes hit the pavement of the parking lot, the peach shirttail comes out of the trousers and he is The Big Easy. "Sorry to keep you waiting," he says.

"It isn't a fit nickname," Thomas Bjorn says. "It is, in a way. He's an easy guy. He goes with the flow. But he's a very professional person. The way I see it, he takes a lot of interest and care in everything that's going on around him. He knows what he knows, and it's more than you think. He thrives on being who he is and nobody else. There are guys out here who try to put on a certain personality, like putting on a suit of clothes. Not Ernie. He's real. It's as simple as that."

Roberts drives everyone the short way home. Behind the brown fence of the Els compound, they are welcomed back by two dogs the size of Mini Cooper cars: a Saint Bernard named George and a Newfoundland called Chloe. By land and by sea, both are rescue dogs (although Chloe, webbed feet and all, is terrified of the water). George is a dead ringer for Charles Laughton.

Changing into swimming trunks but keeping the peach shirt, Els sits on a living-room sofa and chats for a while. However, daughter Samantha, 6 years old as of the day before, is impatient for his company. As he introduces her to a new "uncle," she hands her father a colorful drawing.

"Beautiful!" he exclaims.

"You're holding it upside down," she says.

Samantha is the little blond schoolgirl from the TV commercial, "Sarah," who solves Ernie's blackboard math problem in a sure South African accent ("3 under par"). She has reached first grade, a bitter development to Ernie. Samantha will be less and less portable now. "You only get one chance," he says, "to be a father."

"Ernie likes to do the school run in the morning," Liezl says.

The afternoon is a different story.

"I don't like standing in line listening to all of the women outside the classroom," he says. As far as Samantha is concerned, they are overdue for their swim.

A backyard swimming pool in Britain is pretty much the definition of optimism. Ernie, Samantha and 2½-year-old Ben are like otters in the heated pool. Ben looks a bit like Ernie (even more like Ernie's father, Neels). Samantha is emphatically Ernie's daughter. A "Rainbow" (junior girl scout), gymnast and dancer, she is voraciously athletic, proving it in the pool, and later on the trampoline.

"Now the butterfly," Samantha orders.

"Samantha, I can't do the damn butterfly," Ernie moans.

"Yes you can," she says.

Ben is a fledgling aviator. Just as bedtime is announced, and Ben starts to cry, a commercial jet flies over, barely a speck in the sky, with a white vapor trail. Ben instantly stops crying and looks up. His whole face, his whole body, becomes a smile. Liezl says, "Ben loves airplanes." Ernie has his own, of course, with beds for the children aft. It takes him to the tournaments and, on his own time, to the playgrounds of the world. To Wimbledon for the tennis, Monaco for the Grand Prix, Henley-on-Thames for the scull races, and the Mediterranean for sailing (and a twisted knee).

"Look at Liezl and look at me," Ernie says. "Ben is going to be a big boy."

Back in the peach shirt, with a towel wrapped around his waist, Els fires up the barbecue. "Now," he says, "I'm relaxed."

Three mates, businessmen over from Johannesburg, pop in for a beer. They'd stay for dinner, except they just remembered they left their wives sitting in a restaurant. So they chug down the beer, and with a chop in each hand, hurry away.

"That's very South African," Ernie says as they go. After the chops, he cooks the chicken. Then he carefully assembles a plate of toasted sandwiches with chutney and onion and other tangy ingredients that are very South African, too.

"I miss smelling the African smells," Ernie says. "I miss the smell, when I get to George [east of Cape Town] on the beach, that's in the air, you know? I miss the smell of the food. It's the bush. We call it 'the bush.' It's the breeze. It's the sound of the animals."

He wishes South Africa weren't so far away from his job.

Like Ernie, Liezl looks forward to Decembers at home. But she is wise enough to make a home of wherever they are and presumes England will always represent that to her children. During a rain delay once at The Masters, Ernie took down a book on Ben Hogan and was especially struck by the portrait of Ben's wife, Valerie.

"What a wife, Valerie Hogan," Ernie says. "She was a lady, a total lady. A professional golfer needs a great wife, because the rest of the world doesn't care."

Lapsing in and out of Afrikaans (a musical language, "more Flemish," Ernie says, "than Dutch"), he and Liezl move around each other in a way that signals not only love but respect. She should hear the way he speaks of her when she is out of the room.

"I talk to Liezl about everything," he says. "She knows the game and the business. She knows me."

The equivalents of his vineyards in Stellenbosch are her horses in South Africa, California and Belgium (homeland of the shrunken shrink, Jos Vanstiphout).

"I ride a friend's polo pony nearby," Liezl says. And, following a chukker, does she replace her divots? She laughs and says, "You've seen Julia Roberts in 'Pretty Woman' too many times." Liezl likes to laugh.

"I love Orlando, Fla., where we live, too," Ernie says. "I love the people in the U.S. The sports are different [there are no cricket scores in the newspaper]. We don't talk the same language in sports. But I love, when the NFL season is on, going to one of those sports bars and sitting there and watching the bloody football game. I love it. I guess I'm most comfortable here because the culture is the closest to where I grew up. You know, the English used to rule us. When they left in '61, they didn't leave us a great plan."

Ernie attended an all-white Afrikaans-speaking school that is now integrated. He was protected from the flames, but he could see the smoke. In the time of apartheid, Neels Els, a hardworking man in the truck-transport business, and his wife, Hettie, raised three color-blind children heroically.

"When I was younger, before the world got me," Ernie says, "I was a lot more like my mom. But I think the last 10 years, traveling the world, I've got a lot of my dad in me. Quite a lot. I know what I want. I know what I'm worth, or whatever. At the end of the day, I've become quite -- I guess I don't want to say 'tough' -- but I definitely know what I want."

More than one business agent (he has gone through a stream of them), more than one sportswriter, have tried to play Els, to con him along, to take advantage of the perception of a sort of lumbering, half-witted ruminant, overchewing his cud. They have had their eyebrows singed off. After getting in the face of a writer who used him, Els felt terrible, but not sorry. The level of his own anger depressed him, but what bothered Ernie most of all was that the fellow didn't stand up for himself.

"He just slouched and smirked, and rocked back and forth, and didn't say anything." Els was ashamed for him.

In Ernie's studies, he has majored in people. Though he had a blizzard of American scholarship offers, he didn't go to college. Spending two years in the South African Air Force instead, narrowly avoiding their Vietnam -- Angola -- watching horror films about the African National Congress (the blacks), while the ANC showed horror films about him (the whites), neither of them the truth, he has been educated by the road. Did Davis Love III learn as much at Chapel Hill? When the tsunami hit Thailand in 2004, Phuket wasn't just a name to Els. He knew the territory and the citizens. He felt the terror. Just back from a 13-stroke victory in Shanghai, Ernie is the pro from the planet Earth. He is the only golfer on the PGA Tour who has ever expressed the thought, "Just think what it would mean to golf if a truly great Chinese player came along."

Els was "close to going to the University of Arkansas," he says. "Steve Loy, [Phil Mickelson's] agent at the moment, was the coach there then, and he wanted me to come. When I went through the Junior Worlds in San Diego, Steve was there. We had a good relationship. My dad liked him. I liked him. He looked kind of relaxed, smiled quite easily. My life could have been a lot different. Like Rory Sabbatini. He grew up in South Africa, went to college in Arizona, and now he speaks with an American accent. It's all according to what you're comfortable with, I guess."

What Ernie has said about his father shouldn't leave the impression that Neels Els is only a tough guy, though it's true that he is tough. "We're not pushovers, you know," Neels once told a writer. "We stand up for things. We're old-school. We know what's right, and we don't have to explain ourselves. We know who we are."

But Neels is also a gentle guy, a sentimental guy.

"My dad told me he was sitting in the locker room here in 1994," Ernie says, "when Seve [Ballesteros] came over."

That was the year Els won the first of his record six World Match Play championships at Wentworth. Between Ballesteros and Ernie, in a hellacious 36-hole match (that went 35), they had 12 2s (seven by the loser), chipping in on top of each other twice.

Said Els: "My dad told me that Seve said, 'You know, I tried very hard today. I played very well today. But, your son. Very special.' You can imagine my dad sitting there with tears in his eyes."

Ernie was born Oct. 17, 1969, but this path he is on now opened for him 56 days later, on Dec. 12, when Neels quit drinking for good.

"My father is such an honorable man," Ernie says. "He lost his dad [to cancer] when he was 18, and his dad said, 'Listen, you're to look after these youngsters,' and that's what he did."

Neels worked himself sick; he just didn't sleep. Under the weight of it, he became a teenage alcoholic, a full-fledged, terrified, AA-meeting-attending alcoholic, until one day a guardian angel named Ernie Vermaak (Hettie's father) said to him, "Neels, you need a different hobby," and took him to a driving range.

"I made a promise to God," Neels said, "and He gave me something back. He gave me Ernie."

From the age of 5, Ernie pulled his dad's cart. The hard man and the quiet boy were fellow conspirators on the golf course. After the rounds, Neels drank his Coca-Cola, the other players drank their beer, and Ernie drank in everything. The club pro, Barry Franklin, had a rhythmic swing and a nice collection of instruction books. But Ernie learned the most from his dad.

"The support I got from him is probably very close to what Tiger got from his father," he says. "My dad was there for me. We would get home in the evenings, and we'd brush our grips, clean our clubs, go through the yardage books and plan our rounds. There, for three or four years, I won a lot of amateur tournaments in South Africa. He would work with me, but never push me, thank goodness. I was blessed with a different attitude. I didn't feel I had to prove anything to him. On the other hand, my older brother, Dirk, did feel he had to prove something to Dad. Dirk was very high-strung. When we were young, he and I had our problems."

Born nearly blind in his left eye, "for a long time Dirk felt he was hard done by," and their battles were serious. "He was mad at everything and everybody, but especially at me," Ernie says. "He used to beat the hell out of me."

Dirk could drive a golf ball thunderous distances, but he wasn't as good as his little brother at thinking ahead. Contrary to appearances, Dirk was the fragile one. But despite himself, he helped Ernie. His slightly older crowd gave Ernie an advanced seasoning, and as a younger brother will, Ernie learned not only from his own mistakes but also from Dirk's.

The ending is happy, as Els' endings tend to be.

"The last six or seven years now," Ernie says, "we have become best friends. At first Dirk got into the transport business, like my dad. He completely modernized Dad's operation. Dirk's got a great mind. He's a guy who wants to go forward in life. But I could tell he didn't really love the transport business. 'Come with me,' I said, and he did. Now we're together, working in golf-course design and having so much fun. We're getting ready to do something with Jack Nicklaus. Dirk has a gift for it, a real talent. He's great."

In a way, Arnold Palmer discovered Els, and in another way, Ernie found the other four members of the Big Five. Playing in his first American major, the 1992 PGA Championship, Els drew Palmer for the only two rounds either of them played.

"He was 62," Ernie says. "I remember the handshake he gave me on the first tee. It was a big deal for me, a little bit too big. I never saw a gallery like that. It was my introduction to everything. I don't know why they put me with Arnold Palmer. I guess I would have had a better chance if I'd played with Greg Kraft. But I'm glad they did."

"On the spot," Palmer said, "I invited him to play in my tournament at Bay Hill [which Ernie won in 1998]. It was the first time I'd ever done that." What precisely did Arnie see in him? "A real confidence in himself. And, as someone once said, he doesn't have to talk about it. He's one of those 'I'll show you' types. I guess I kind of liked that."

Ernie's sense of history grew from there. He sought out Bobby Locke in South Africa. In discussions of the '50s, Locke isn't mentioned nearly often enough with Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead. After Els started competing in The Masters, he wrote Snead and asked to play with Sam in the Par-3 Contest. They had a brilliant afternoon full of syrupy swings and salty jokes.

"The golfer Ernie most reminds me of," Gary Player says, "is Sam."

Paired with Nicklaus at Augusta on Sunday in 1998, the 28-year-old Els was mystified when the 58-year-old Nicklaus whispered to him on the first tee, "Let's pretend we're the final group." Now, Ernie understands. Jack shot 68 that day, to Els' 72, and tied for sixth. Ernie can rattle off Jack's round, hole by hole. ("He didn't eagle 2, he birdied it, but then he holed this incredibly quick putt from off the edge at 3 and … ")

That same year, outside the press room at the Players Championship, Els and a writer were re-engaged in golf's monotonous conversation about "the best player never to win a major." David Duval, Colin Montgomerie and Phil Mickelson were the popular candidates at the time, but Ernie said, "Vijay belongs on that list." "Where?" the writer asked. "At the top," he said.

"I met Vijay in 1991 in Santa Ponsa, Majorca, OK? I saw this Indian guy down the fairway. He always used to wear these white pants and this whiter-than-white glove and this red shirt. Snazzy dresser. Friendly guy. Always hanging around with the South Africans, around Blandy [John Bland], Tony Johnstone, Justin Hobday, you know. Just trying to survive, to make a check. Vijay blended right in with our guys."

He and Els became great practice-round friends.

"I got ahead of him a little bit, maybe for three or four years," Ernie says. "Then, the last two years, he swung it around." This isn't the reason their practice games have dwindled. "It just became too much," Ernie says. "Too much media attention. You want to play your practice round and get the hell out of there. I still like Vijay. I've always liked him. And I admire his game. He's got everything. Power. Finesse. He's got it all."

Ernie met Tiger Woods on a practice putting green in 1994. A year later, as the defending U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur champions, they played together at both summer opens, Shinnecock Hills and St. Andrews. When Tiger was thinking of turning pro two years before he did, Ernie advised him, "Eighteen is too young, for reasons apart from golf. Nineteen might be all right, and 20 is fine."

"Ernie was very helpful," Tiger said the day he declared for the business at 20, in Milwaukee. "He gave me a lot of insight from both sides of it."

A 66 at Royal Lytham and St. Annes in the 1996 British Open convinced Woods he was ready, and Els was the first person he told. (The secret was kept for a month, until Tiger had collected his third amateur title.) Ernie tied for second at Lytham, Woods for 22nd (low amateur), so their presence was required at Tom Lehman's crowning. Afterward, in the clubhouse bar, they had a beer. "I don't have to tell you," Ernie said as they left, "you're more than good enough to be playing out here."

Before Tiger mastered circumspection, he lost to Els in a TV event involving the major champions of 1997 and confessed, "Ernie sort of played an old man's game today to my kid's game. He's got those soft hands and gets it in play and let's me blow it all over the place and then outthinks me and outsavvies me. I want to get a little more like that."

He did. The primary victim of the emergence of Tiger Woods, especially in the sublime summer of 2000, was Els. Including a second to Singh at the Masters, Ernie was the runner-up in three majors that year, by a combined 23 shots in Woods' Pebble Beach and St. Andrews blitzes. Like Tom Weiskopf under the tank tracks of Nicklaus, Els was thought to be dead. He wasn't. A year ago, Ernie had a putt to win or tie on the 72nd hole of three majors, while reaching the final twosome of the fourth. Those disappointments were supposed to finish him off, too. They haven't. If Els, instead of Duval, had tumbled 600 rungs all of the way down to Ian Baker-Finchville, at least there would have been some logic to golf. Alas, there is none.

Speaking of Duval, Els says, "He got a raw deal from the press. David wears those dark glasses. 'Oh, God, he's hiding behind his glasses!' Hell, it's just his way of getting away. Ben Hogan went away on the golf course. Put his head down and off he went. Byron Nelson wasn't exactly a showman in '45, was he? Don't they realize that we all have our way of getting away? That we all have to do our thing alone?"

Phil Mickelson and Retief Goosen were Els' original opponents at age 14. They remain each other's measuring sticks. The photograph of Phil standing next to Ernie, holding the Junior World Trophy in San Diego, is impossible to look at without laughing. Ernie is the smiling towhead from "My Three Sons"; Phil towers over him.

"Ernie's grown a bit," says Goosen, the most understated great player in golf, "but he hasn't changed otherwise."

In South Africa, Retief has always seemed like Els' little brother. As a matter of fact, he is 8 months older.

"You probably won't believe this either," Goosen says, "but Ernie had the same swing at 14. Exactly the same. We know each other well, but I won't say we know each other extremely well."

It isn't possible for them to.

"I think from week to week," Liezl says, "the players have a love-hate relationship. They hate being beaten by one another on the golf course, but they appreciate one another away from the course. They can't be too good a friend to each other; it could interfere with their games. And you don't want to kill the guy on the golf course and then pretend nothing's happened. It's a delicate situation. It's tricky. But, at the bottom of it, there's a mutual respect."

As the barbecue winds down, the bugs ("they're no-see-ums, aren't they?" Ernie says) seem to be enjoying the taste of caddie Roberts and the visitor best, so those two are the first to move inside.

"America can't get its head around why this guy flies all over the world," Ricci says in the living room, "taking the game to all corners of the globe. They criticize him for it, saying it holds him back. What they don't understand is that he cares about the game and where it's going. They have no idea how much passion he has. I see it up close. He can be a hard man with me. Sometimes, you have to have that edge, you know, to get to where you are going, to be at the top of that tree. He'll have flashes of temper, believe me. It happens, and then it's over. That's it."

All of the international golfers started out the same way: as homesick boys crying themselves to sleep in strange countries. Bernhard Langer talks about what it meant for him, as a teenager, to look up and see Jack Nicklaus, in the flesh, in Germany. "It's everything," Els says. He has joined the group in the living room.

"Look at Ernie's foundation in South Africa," Roberts says, "bringing struggling kids to golf. There's one kid now who has an immense amount of talent. His name is Matthew Kent. I think he's 18."

"Look out for him, man," Ernie says. "It's like when I came through."

But, as Kent is white -- a big, strong lad from a rough circumstance -- he isn't exactly what Ernie has been looking for.

"You know what I'm looking for, in South Africa?" he says. "I'm looking for Tiger Woods. I mean, in South Africa. Johann Rupert, a big shot there, a good friend of mine, goes into the townships, finds talent and throws money behind it. I have my little collection of kids, boys and girls, mostly black. But the kid I'm really looking for is there, somewhere, I know he is. I'm serious. Can you imagine what it would mean if we find him?"

Knowing his guest hasn't been to the Transvaal in 12 years, Els says, "You have to go back, man. You have to. It's now in the hands of the black man, as it should have been before Nelson Mandela was put in jail. We'd be so much further along. You're from Chicago, so you know the really good things and the really bad things about Chicago. Johannesburg is a big city, too, and it still has a big city's crime, but less. Less. It's easing off. It's better. If you really know Johannesburg, it's a beautiful place. You have to come check out the change."

On another Friday, Ernie leads a gang of six on a pub crawl. "Take an extra liver with you," Ricci had recommended, but it turns out not to have been necessary. The six men crawl through only the one pub, drinking beers and shandies. Because two executives from Els' winery are along, a little wine is tasted. Despite his heritage, Ernie isn't afraid of alcohol. He isn't afraid of very much. Without mentioning any names, he thinks some of his fellow pros ought to be more afraid of gambling.

"That always ends badly," he says, "no matter how much money you have."

Ernie jokes with the innkeeper, but the customers leave Els alone. Nobody follows him outside, around the corner of the building, to the "gents." The only thing he is asked to sign is the check. The U.S. is indeed a world away.

"I look at Samantha," Ernie says, aside, "and I think to myself, she'll be 16, and I'll be done. I'll be 45."

"Yeah," replies a cynic, "you bums all say you'll be done at 45. That's why there are so many liver spots still climbing up the fairways in Augusta."

Els throws back his head and laughs. "We are so competitive, that's the problem," he says. "We can't help ourselves. It's in our bones. It's part of us. You're over par, you're struggling with your swing, or you're putting like an idiot, and all you can think of is, how the hell can I get back into this thing?"

To the question of "how," the question of "when" has been added. When might a golfer pivot on the reconstructed ACL in his left knee? (Six weeks after arthroscopic surgery, says Ernie's doctor.) When might he swing a club? (Eight weeks.) He may play "gentle golf" at nine or 10 weeks, tournament golf at 16. By the calendar, that would draw a circle around Nov. 28. But the prognosis is good and, in the meantime, Els has finally come to the stop that so many had prescribed for him before his Mediterranean mishap.

"I'm glad it's over," he says, "and it went well."

He is under orders to swim (not the butterfly, Samantha). Happily, a pool is handy.

Enjoy the English holiday, Ernie. Go easy on the chutney sandwiches. And remember that 17 days after arthroscopic surgery on her knee, marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson qualified for the Olympic Games. She went on to win the gold medal.

Tom Callahan is a contributing editor for Golf Digest magazine